


Adrift

by laireshi



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Angst, M/M, Twincest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 13:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laireshi/pseuds/laireshi
Summary: V had wanted to live. Vergil didn’t know how to.
Relationships: Dante/Vergil (Devil May Cry)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 113





	Adrift

_I want to go home_, Dante had said, and Vergil had obliged. What else could he have done? _Home_ was a foreign word, an archaism out of place anywhere but in the halcyon days of their childhood, before it had burnt down, further back, before their father had left. Vergil couldn’t have asked, _And what is home_, not because he’d known what Dante had meant, but because he’d been scared—the power of the Qliphoth fruit running through his veins amounting to nothing in front of this problem—that he’d forgotten how to even pronounce it.

_Home_ was gone, reduced to ashes that he sometimes thought he could still feel clinging to his skin. 

Foolishness, that; he’d scrubbed his skin clean so many times back then, trying to get the phantom sensation off it, hoping that if he’d try hard enough, he’d wash himself free of the demon inside him, too, until he’d accepted and welcomed the strength it brought him. Mundus had torn his body apart, skin and bone, until almost nothing of him was left inside the black armour. The years after, he’d suffered defeat after defeat until there was nothing but scars on him.

The Qliphoth’s power had reconstructed his body back into what it was supposed to be. He had smooth skin without even the hard patches on his fingers that’d come from touching the Yamato. No visible signs of the nightmares that stayed in his mind and nothing to clue him in as to what he’d forgotten. 

And yet, sometimes the light fell on his wrist just so, and he thought he could see white thin lines cut into his flesh by infinitely sharp, infinitely thin black thorns. And sometimes he could see the burns reminding him of when he’d run through what had been his home, aflame, in vain crying for his mother to find and help him. 

Weakness of the human mind, that, but he knew better now than to try and reject it. He’d been undone too many times to ever seek it out again.

Even if every step here, in the human realm, felt like it was taken by someone else. 

Dante was visibly happier. Vergil couldn’t blame him. His brother had a life here: good friends (another foreign word, one he’d never had a chance to understand), a job that let him spend his more violent urges. He’d been tired of hell, by the end of it. Vergil had a suspicion he should have been tired, too—he’d spent so much longer than Dante there, his memories full of pain—but he’d scarcely remembered another life. The month he’d spent on Earth helping people as V was offset by the same month he’d spent as Urizen on his demonic throne, encouraging mass slaughter. 

The human world didn’t seem like a world Vergil could stay in, but there wasn’t another choice. Hell had been familiar, but it hadn’t been a place to stay either. 

Vergil wandered at night. Looked at the night sky and was reminded of dark lakes reflecting unnatural lights, waiting for a careless demon to ruffle the water’s surface. Walked through old forests, his hand on the Yamato, both on edge and unwilling to leave too soon. Trees were dangerous: they had to feed on something, too, but he walked and walked and nothing attacked him here.

V had wanted to live. Vergil didn’t know how to.

He kissed Dante and he found his meaning then for brief moments, tasting blood on his brother’s lips like he could drink Dante’s understanding from him. 

(It was disconcerting, that for all of Vergil’s research, all his vast knowledge—it was Dante who knew exactly who he was and where he belonged. Vergil’s identity had been ripped from him much like his home had been, but in his mind it was no excuse for this particular weakness.)

He didn’t sleep. Sometimes he pretended, and in the small hours of the night he could feel Dante’s eyes on him, watching, worried; whether for Vergil or for what he could do to the world around them, Vergil did not know. 

They didn’t talk about it, but Vergil stopped faking sleep. Dante slept better without him, anyway. 

In the Underworld, they had needed each other; Dante more so than Vergil. Back on Earth, Dante had no need for him at all.

It suited Vergil just fine. Hadn’t he always wished for that when they were kids?

He travelled to distant cities; nothing was really far away with the Yamato in his hand. He walked the streets, observing the humanity. Cities were something that didn’t exist in hell, something actually different. Not all demons were solitary, but those who weren’t preferred to keep to their small clans and tribes. Many of these places—London, Rome, Tokyo—he had visited before. He lacked the same urgency now—no longer did he have a plan like then, or any kind of plan at all; no longer did he need to fight off demons send to kill him at every step—but it didn’t translate to him relaxing; if anything it made him more restless. He never stayed long: hours tops, and then he was back in the claustrophobic walls of the Devil May Cry, an intruder in his twin’s life. 

Sometimes Dante was waiting when he came back. Sometimes he looked like he wanted to ask, but he never did, and Vergil didn’t volunteer the answers. What was there to say, anyway? _Nothing feels real, not even my own body, _and _how do I know **you’re** real_, and _are you sure I’m free?_

Pathetic fears. Vergil looked into the mirror for a long time and didn’t saw Nelo Angelo in it. He wasn’t sure he saw himself either. (The pain when Dante landed a hit in a sparring fight was real, but pain usually was. Vergil wouldn’t seek it out to test any hypotheses.)

He wondered why Dante had insisted on going to hell with him. He wondered why he’d tried so hard to crawl out of it in the first place. 

“Are you going to leave me?” Dante asked, at last, quiet and unusually sincere.

Talking with his brother always resembled a battlefield, and Vergil had always known how to make it hurt. It would be so easy, an instant win, a split-second victory, to look into Dante’s eyes and say, _Yes_.

“No,” he answered instead, and he couldn’t say if it was a lie or not.

(He’d left over twenty years ago, hurt and bleeding on the top of Temen-Ni-Gru, and it felt like his last true memory, the last time Vergil was _Vergil_, and it felt like he’d never found his way back.)

**Author's Note:**

> there is a [twitter post](https://twitter.com/tonytears/status/1192238739008954373) for it.


End file.
